"Say please," I coached for the hundredth time that morning. "Say thank you to the nice park attendant." The man in the ticket booth stamped our hands with a blue polar bear. I sounded a similar directive again and again as we made our way through the natural attraction.

It's become part of my speech stapling every thought and action together over the past couple of weeks. I could say that I am on a mission to save the world (once again) armed with only a tattered copy of Emily Post and a mountain of patience and hope, starting with three little boys.

I feel the weight of responsibility when I consider that one month's visit is a big chunk of time in their young lives.

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Steven only has two years left before his bearing and behavior become the prominent and permanent bedrock of his identity. Being polite is not second nature, I can't think of one toddler to the manner born, and if it isn't embedded in the early years it is difficult to make a considerate attitude stick.

As for young children such as his brother, Robert, who is already 6, and even his 8-year-old cousin, Collin, the process of polishing manners is a slow and arduous phase of constant reminding and grinding rehearsal, though I do see signs of light at the end of that very long tunnel.

So, we return to the Polar Caves, which are located in a little town northwest of Plymouth, New Hampshire, called Rumney, and are the perfect place to exercise our demeanors, and our gross motor skills.

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The geological site was formed 50,000 years ago, when a third continental glacier swept down over the White Mountains. Close your eyes, and picture me: matriarch bearing down, scraping and scrubbing the feral dirt away, loosening the stubborn rock of rudeness, moving the egocentric stuff from the mountains of three little boys' determinations.

Forming good manners requires the sacrifice of time and patience, and at times I feel my influence is only the force of a single drop of water on a landscape of solid granite.

"Follow the arrowed polar bear trail marker," I say, pointing the way through a maze of irresistible and climbable passages, the geological wonder named, to the boys' disappointment, for its cold, polar breezes, and not for the magnificent animal that resides where another glacier is still at work.

"The geology of the Polar Caves began during Paleozoic Era of geologic time, 200 to 300 million years ago," wrote Plymouth State College scientists Francis Haley and Mark T. Sylvestre for the Polar Caves' website.

I wonder for a second if all this fuss over good manners is even worth the concerted effort, since, in the big scheme of things, we are only a blip in time. But those blips do add up to form the bedrock and maybe even the higher consciousness of our collective humanity.

The good scientists wrote: "During the 200 million years, which followed the intrusion of the granite, weathering and erosion removed thousands of feet of the overlaying sediments, eventually exposing the large bodies of granite until they became high mountains."

Of course, forming manners doesn't take anywhere near that long, but it sure feels like it when you're in the moment, and the next moment, and the one after that, enough so that it seems practicing good conduct with young children qualifies as an era of its own. Give us a cooling off and resting bench of bedrock for our weary bones, please. Thank you.

"The ice that once covered this place was 15 times higher than that massive rock face," I said trying to explain the forces of nature that created the natural wonder.

Haley and Sylvester wrote: "The glacier thickened, reaching a height of well over a mile to cover the highest mountains and fill the deepest valleys....such a massive accumulation of ice in motion, though the movement was slow, had a tremendous destructive force ..."

I am that glacier when it comes to my grand boys and their behavior.

We stood at the bottom of the sheer cliff, our ball cap brims tilted dizzyingly upward. We were like ants. I shivered at the crushing power of all that force, felt a protective pang of apprehension, and the responsibility of a parent, now grandparent, as we navigated, stepped carefully and ducked in and out of caves, our hands and feet scrabbling through the geological maze. All the same the continuous drip of lessons can sometimes feel like a maddening boring of reiteration, and you think they'll never get it on their own.

But as we moved down a narrow flight of stairs at the ferny base of the sheer cliffs, a mother with three young children, around our grandsons' ages, approached the bottom of the steps. She herded her kids aside so we could descend. But one of her sons scuttled up just as Steven had started his descent. Immediately, with the authority of a traffic cop, his little hand shot straight out. "Excuse me!" he said with great emphasis. To Steven's dismay, the climbing boy continued up, squeezing past.

The mother smiled and laughed looking up toward us. "Well, at least your boy has learned some manners!"

"Nature did not end her work with the formation of the caves alone; she also exposed a variety of minerals embedded in the granite boulders," the scientists determined.

And so, as parents, our work is never done, nor do our kids want it to be. Collin tells me if we didn't have manners in this world we'd be in a pretty big mess. Robert says it would all go wrong. They only had half a dozen spats yesterday, and this morning, though they are arguing over whose way is better when it comes to putting the living room pillows back, at least they are beginning to understand why being considerate of others is important to our survival. I just want them to stand tall as mountains someday, and if it means my being a drip, then so be it.

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